Kyle Green | The Roanoke Times

December 18, 2009 David Damico, defense attorney, talks to the media after a federal jury found William A. White guilty on four counts and not guilty on three counts.

U.S. v. William A. White

Past coverage: Daily trial updates from inside the courtroom
Bios: Meet the people involved in the case
Timeline: Catch up on the backstory

Done in by his own words, Internet hatemonger William A. White was convicted Friday of threatening people from Virginia Beach to Canada.

The verdict, however, was not a total repudiation of White's assertion that the First Amendment should protect his incendiary speech. Of seven counts against White, the federal jury acquitted him of three.

White, who will be sentenced later, could face up to 35 years in prison.

The self-proclaimed leader of a Roanoke-based neo-Nazi group, White was returned to the city jail late Friday afternoon as a snowstorm swirled around the downtown courthouse where, for the past week and a half, the jury heard testimony about how he used the Internet and other means to terrorize total strangers with whom he disagreed.

Yet in the end, White's own words led to his downfall.

From the defendant's e-mails, letters, telephone calls and online postings, the jury heard time and time again the graphic and racist rhetoric that spewed from the 32-year-old's home computer and cellphone.

Dressed in the same black, three-piece suit that he had worn throughout the trial, White showed no emotion as the verdicts were read.

At least for now, the convictions will silence a man called "possibly the loudest and most obnoxious neo-Nazi leader in America " by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors hate groups.

They also were met with "a sigh of relief" from a community that has been dealing with White's campaign of harassment since 2004, said Brenda Hale, president of Roanoke's NAACP chapter.

"At last, justice has been served," said Hale, whom White once referred to as a "n----r in need of lynching."

In closing arguments to the jury, Justice Department attorney John Richmond spent more than an hour recounting the personal attacks and death wishes that White leveled against a bank employee from Missouri, a nationally syndicated columnist from Maryland, a university administrator from Delaware, a small-town mayor from New Jersey, a human rights lawyer from Canada and two tenants of an apartment complex in Virginia Beach.

"Defendant White does not get the last word," Richmond told the jury. You all do. And the last word is guilty."

However, White was found not guilty of making threats against Leonard Pitts, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Miami Herald, and Charles Tyson, the former mayor of South Harrison township in New Jersey.

Although the exact reasons for the jury's verdict were not known Friday, Pitts and Tyson were the most public of the seven people White was accused of threatening.

Lawyers for White had argued that he was attempting to engage in political discourse, and that the tenor of his language was in keeping, at least in part, with the bare-knuckled means of communicating in today's world of cable television and Internet blogging.

In the case of Pitts, White told the columnist that he looked forward to the day when whites would rise up again and slaughter and enslave blacks. He also told an editor at the Miami Herald that he wouldn't shed a tear if "some looney" took the information from his Web site and killed Pitts.

"Frankly, I would like to have been part of the guilty verdicts and not the acquittals," Pitts said in a telephone interview Friday evening, "because you would like the validation of what you went through.

"But having said that, I'm ecstatic that he was convicted."

The third count that White was acquitted of was a charge of threatening a bank employee with the intent to extort. While the jury convicted White of threatening Citibank employee Jennifer Petsche, it found the evidence lacking on a second charge alleging he did so to resolve a dispute with the bank over his credit card account.

During the eight-day trial in U.S. District Court in Roanoke, the jury heard testimony about six incidents that fit the following pattern: White would learn of a controversy that involved race in the news, look up the telephone numbers and addresses of the people involved, and then send them e-mails with hateful commentary calling for their demise in one way or another.

He often followed up by posting the information on overthrow.com, a Web site with a following of like-minded racists.

For example, when White became enraged about a diversity awareness program at the University of Delaware, he called the office of an administrator and identified himself as the commander of the American National Socialist Workers Party. He them told the assistant who answered the phone that anyone who thinks the way Kathleen Kerr did should be shot, and that he would hunt her down.

And when black residents of a Virginia Beach apartment complex filed a housing discrimination lawsuit against their white landlord, White waded into the dispute with a letter to the residents addressed to "Whiny Section 8 n----rs."

"You may get one over on your landlord this time, and you may not," he wrote. "But know that the white community has noticed you, and we know that you are and never will be anything other than a dirty parasite -- and that our patience with you and the government that coddles you runs thin."

One resident of the apartment complex testified that White's comments frightened her so badly that she packed her belongings in 15 minutes and fled her home.

Other victims told of how they sought police protection, moved so White would not know their whereabouts, and even changed the name of their newborn daughter to keep her from his reach.

In closing arguments, defense attorney David Damico reminded the jury that White never approached any of his victims -- much less laid a hand on them.

"Where is the evidence that Mr. White has ever done anything violent to anybody, ever?" Damico asked.

As unpopular and hateful as White's words were, Damico implored the jury to give them the protection that every citizen enjoys under the First Amendment.

"That's what this case challenges you to do," Damico said. "Be an American, even if it makes your blood boil, and acquit Bill White."

Although White faces up to 35 years in prison, Damico and co-counsel Ray Ferris will ask for a much shorter term when he is sentenced later. White has been in jail almost continuously since his arrest in October 2008.

The convictions marked a huge setback for an online agitator who up until now has managed to straddle the fine line between free speech and illegal threats. Earlier this year, a judge in Chicago dismissed a similar charge against White on free speech grounds.

"For an extended period of time, William White has hidden behind the First Amendment while making racist remarks and threatening people who are different from him," U.S. Attorney Timothy Heaphy said following the verdicts.

"While the First Amendment protects our ability to express views even if unpopular, it does not provide a license to threaten, intimidate, and inflict emotional distress."